UK employees don’t work like they used to
Aug 02 2010
The British work ethic isn't quite what it used to be
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In spring 2010 there were as many people in the UK working between 16 and 30 hours per week as there were those working 45 hours or more per week.
Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) casts doubt over the UK’s “long-hours" culture. In the final quarter of 2009 (the latest period for which comparable Eurostat figures are available) only four EU countries, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden, had shorter average working weeks than the UK.
The loss of nearly one million full-time jobs and a shift to part-time working since the start of the recession has resulted in a drop of almost 10 per cent in the number of UK men working more than 45 hours per week. The study of official UK and EU statistics finds that the recession has resulted in both a fall in total employment (down by 2 per cent to 580,000 in the two years to spring 2010), and a shift from full-time employment (which has fallen by 4.1 per cent to 910,000,), to part-time employment (which has increased by 4.4 per cent to 330,000).
This switch, claims the CIPD, is to some extent due to many people working shorter hours to help their employers cut labour costs and thereby minimise redundancies. The combined impact of these changes is a net fall of 32.7 million (3.5 per cent) in the number of hours worked each week in the UK.
However, total hours have finally started to increase, indicating a modest, though uneven, pick-up in demand for labour since mid-2009. In spring 2010 there were 440,000 fewer men working more than 45 hours per week than two years earlier (a net reduction of 9.4 per cent). Male employees account for the bulk of the fall – the number working more than 45 hours has dropped by 11 per cent.
By contrast, there has been no net change in the number of women working more than 45 hours per week, with a small fall in female employees working long hours exactly offset by an increase in the number of self-employed women working long hours.
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